Trump Doesn’t Need Maduro’s Cooperation To Deport Venezuelans

The agreement that President Donald Trump in January foisted on leftist Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro to accept thousands of Venezuelan air deportees is teetering. Maduro is mad because the Trump administration canceled a license allowing Chevron to operate in the South American country, citing the fact that Maduro has only accepted a few hundred criminal alien Venezuelans.

The Trump administration should let that deal fail and be glad, because it was never needed. Most of the nearly 1 million Venezuelans who illegally crossed the U.S. southern border were living contentedly in more than 20 other peaceful countries for years before they realized the Biden administration would grant them an American lifestyle upgrade. Many Venezuelan migrants were granted U.S. asylum by lying about the fact that they had lived for years already in other safe, welcoming countries.

The Trump administration can readily — and in good conscience — just send them back to these other countries in Latin America and Europe that already accepted them once, and had provided residency, asylum, and work authorization status.

According to interviews I have conducted with thousands of Venezuelans intending to cross the U.S. border along the migrant trails of Latin America in recent years, virtually none had lived in Venezuela for five, eight, or even 10 years when they showed up at the border falsely claiming they had only just now fled Maduro for U.S. sanctuary. Some young Venezuelan men and women I interviewed have no recollection of ever living in Venezuela at all.

The vast majority I interviewed, long before they lawyered up at the border with stories doctored to enhance bogus asylum claims, told me they had been living happily, comfortably, safely, and often very prosperously — for years — in the warm embrace of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, or a dozen other Latin American countries known more for vacation appeal than persecution.

A recent United Nations report says 6.7 million are still living in 17 countries of Latin America, most of which “continue to provide protection, extending integration opportunities and essential services to refugees and migrants” and follow “commendable practices in supporting migrants’ and refugees’ access to regular status, refugee recognition and sustainable inclusion.”

Exodus and Fraud

An exodus from Maduro’s kleptocratic dictatorship to these host countries began in about 2016 and increased after a disastrous 2017 national financial collapse. But back then, Trump 1.0’s border was battened down against illegal immigration. So nearly 8 million Venezuelans went to live in 17 different Latin American countries and all over Europe, the majority in next-door Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Then, years into their contented exiles, in 2021 the Biden government invited a massive rush from these countries by letting almost all Venezuelans in on asylum and “humanitarian parole” claims (which are supposed to be temporary and for urgent humanitarian reasons) as though they were fleeing the Nazis.

They only began to abandon their exile locations for the United States in 2021 when Trump left office with his tough border policies and the new Biden government entered with lenient ones. The Biden government started letting presumably endangered Venezuelans into the United States on asylum and humanitarian protection parole claims that they could no longer tolerate Maduro.

My Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Center for Immigration Studies revealed that many Venezuelans authorized to fly into the United States on the infamous flights parole program were coming from some of the bougiest places on Earth. They include France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Greece, Fiji, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, and all manner of Caribbean Island vacation gems. 

Adding insult to this injury, the Biden administration granted 600,000 of these Venezuelans blanket protection from deportation via Temporary Protected Status (TPS), on the phony grounds that they needed protection from the Venezuela they hadn’t seen in up to a decade. Trump has since rescinded these protections.

I reported this mass fraud in a May 3, 2023, video for the Center for Immigration Studies under the headline, “U.S. Enabling Mass Asylum and Humanitarian Permit Fraud at the Southern Border,” based on a representative sampling of videotaped interviews with Venezuelans on the trails. In interview after interview, they all told me they hadn’t lived in Venezuela for many years and were gainfully employed, running good businesses, attending colleges, or raising children in safe and secure homes in next-door countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

“I loooved Ecuador! It’s beautiful. The people are very kind,” said one well-appointed Venezuelan woman I met in Juarez who had just received U.S. permission to enter on a humanitarian protection permit, as though she had just escaped torture and starvation in Venezuela. Hardly. She smiled widely at the good memories of living the last seven years in Quito, Ecuador, where she’d made a decent living managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

“They have a lot of values. The fruit, in particular, is very good. Anything with onions over there is good, spicy,” she said, beaming. “It’s a very generous place, a very beautiful place.”

She and her boyfriend only decided to abandon Ecuador’s tasty food, picturesque landscapes, and kind moral people upon learning that the Americans were letting everyone in to notch up an even richer life.

Neutering Another Problem

Returning these Venezuelans to any of their first safe spaces would solve another political and legal issue for the Trump administration: a growing migrant advocate chorus of allegations — in U.S. courts and in accommodating media outlets — that the Trump administration is sending Venezuelans back into harm’s way, meaning back to Maduro.

Immigrant rights groups have sued, challenging the Trump administration’s deportation plans for Venezuelans. Top U.S. government officials under Biden pushed this fraudulent narrative all the time, and its many partisans have taken the baton and run with it.

“The living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in turmoil, unable to protect its own citizens,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asserted in a March 2021 statement announcing TPS coverage to Venezuelans who were by then pouring over the border: “It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps forward to support eligible Venezuelan nationals already present here, while their home country seeks to right itself out of the current crisis.”

The Trump administration should shift the burden to other countries. El Salvador, for instance, has already agreed to accept all the criminal aliens Trump wants to send. Colombia, which already had taken on the most Venezuelans since 2016, is back on board taking U.S. deportees after a tariff threat from Trump overcame an initial refusal.

Maduro deserves maximum sanctions, punishment, and diplomatic isolation. The Trump administration doesn’t need him for anything, especially when many other countries will provide Venezuelans a home.

Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based research institute, and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. His latest book is “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History” (Bombardier Books). For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd.